The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire.

Unlike many collections of essays, this one was designed with an argument in mind. The editors wish to challenge the notion that the major theme of the religious history of late antiquity was the struggle between Christianity and paganism. In place of a |conflict model' of Christianity and paganism battling for dominance of the religious life of the ancient cities, they propose the model of a |market-place' in which many groups were on display hawking their wares, sometimes aggressively, sometimes quietly, borrowing techniques from one another and on occasion passing off the goods of their competitors as their own. Yet, as the title suggests, the accent is on the Jews among pagans and Christians, and in some ways the net effect of this volume is to expand the list of competitors to include the Jews as a third party rather than to highlight the …